


Such Disparate Facets

by DeltaHexagon



Category: Metroid Series
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-17
Updated: 2013-12-17
Packaged: 2018-01-04 23:35:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 5,391
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1087001
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DeltaHexagon/pseuds/DeltaHexagon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lonely was one word used to describe Zebes. Sad was another. Some even went as far as to call it angry. And why wouldn’t it be? It was only home to the Space Pirates, after all. And it was trying so desperately to push them away…</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Such Sad Abandonment

_Loneliness. A cold dark planet in a cold dark system far away from prying eyes. And with Crateria as its mask, there was no reason to think it harboured anything more than sad isolation…_

Rain.

A soft continuous patter of acid rain, falling from clouds the colour of dirty ash.

Zebes wore a mask of hard etched rock and dark foreboding caves, a jagged welcome to any passing visitors. Or the rare bounty hunter. And the Hunter hadn’t really been expecting anything overtly fancy when her gunship, a flash of blinding gold on a desolate gray plain, came in for a noisy landing. No. The vista of lonely alien rock that greeted her on arrival was exactly what she had been hoping for: a cold dark place to match her cold dark heart.

With nary a word or a sound she exited her ship.

The hollow clink of rain echoing inside her helmet was a calming noise and for a moment she closed her eyes. She heard nothing else. For one blessed moment, her poor fractured inner world was at peace; a fiery mind ablaze with hatred and agony lulled into temporary sleep by the gentle voice of an ancient planet. For one blessed moment, she was human. There were no Space Pirates, there was no Ridley, and she wasn’t a bounty hunter. She was Samus Aran, and she was happy.

Behind a visor of muted green, she smiled.

But her happiness was cut short by a soft tinny beep from within her helmet, a harsh sound of technology that turned the gentle rainfall into something annoying. The smile fell in favour of an expressionless mask, and once more Samus Aran had become the Hunter. There was no hesitation in her movements. Following the new blip on her radar with mechanical precision she began the hunt.

And it was thus the sound of rain and far off thunder ceased, and the Hunter entered a world of soft shadows and softer noises, a place where it seemed as though time had come to a shuddering stop and nature continued on its slow relentless course without a care. If it weren’t for the energy doors nestled between dripping wet rock it would have been beautiful, in its alien way. But the Space Pirate structures somehow seemed to blight the landscape, and the Hunter felt a cold hatred well up in the back of her mind.

A sudden hurried scuffling broke her from her thoughts, and looking up she saw a cluster of ground dwelling trilobites scurry away at her approach, disappearing into the stone walls as though they were not made of flesh and bone but of water and air. Once again she caught herself smiling and quickly rid herself of the expression. She was here to destroy the Space Pirates and recover the Metroid hatchling, not smile girlishly at such trivial things as the soft patter of rain or the fright of some local fauna.

No. She was here to destroy. And destroy she would.

The downward journey began with one emotionless step.


	2. Such Thriving Harmony

_Life. A sprawling underground forest teeming with life; unbridled, pure, brilliant. But all things must come to an end, and as it grows lower Brinstar slowly starts to die._

Life.

Such a mass of pure life.

The Hunter was always surprised at the vast amount of life when she came down here, amazed at the swarming armies of plantlife and native fauna teeming just underneath Zebes’ cracked and scarred surface. She was always inclined to believe, upon planetfall, that the Space Pirates had killed everything off with their relentless technology. And why would anyone ever think otherwise? Crateria was barren and dead, constantly awash with that steady drizzle of acid rain. It was all anyone ever saw on first glance. No one would believe that just under the surface teemed so much vigour, so much energy.

Sometimes the Hunter mused that the Chozo had taken the spark of life with them when they had left. They were always so close to that mystical life force that there was a good chance it was true. But then, on boarding that solemn elevator ride down to the underground forests of Brinstar, she realized that it was not true. The life had just crawled down further, away from the alien presence of the Space Pirates and closer to the planet’s core. Closer to the life force.

Thick ropey vines studded with venomous thorns and glittering with a haze of purple poison adorned the walls, the ceilings, the floors. Like great swords the thorns jutted, threatening to tear a hole in the Hunter’s chozonian suit. But where they did touch they left nary a scratch, their sharpened tips no match for reinforced steel. Ignoring the no doubt deadly thorns the Hunter carried on, her exploration leading her deeper into the maze of green. The further down she got the more alive it got, the hotter it got; the thicker it got. There was absolutely no doubt that if she were to take off her helmet she’d be besieged with such heady aromas from the abundant plantlife that her system would have overloaded. Not to say she would have, for the alien atmosphere would kill her, anyhow. But it was an amusing thought to entertain, nonetheless. What if she were a Chozo, she wondered. If she were able to breathe the atmosphere? What would this place smell like? Would it be rife with sweet odours, like the fruit stands back on destroyed K2-L? Or would it be like a bouquet of fresh flowers, brought to her by her long gone mother?

As she walked she passed a thick knot of vines intertwined around a pulsing orb of blue energy. The Hunter paused to inspect it. She was down very low, now. So low that the heat was almost unbearable and her suit had to readjust its internal processes to keep her system stable. This innocuous blue orb of organic tissue, pulsing with a distinct beat that she now realized she had heard all this time, beating away persistently in the background, was ablaze with a swarm of tiny alien insects. There was no doubt that they were pollinating it, feasting on its pollen while inadvertently implanting it with alien spores. Now that she thought about it there were many of the blue orbs pulsating their steady bass beat down here. Maybe this was not just a tiny little self sustained ecosystem, maybe it was something bigger and more important.

Maybe the entirety of Zebes was alive, and Brinstar was merely part of it. And while the Chozo knew this the Space Pirates did not care. And they were killing the planet slowly with nothing but their twisted goals to follow. The Space Pirates.

Just thinking about them made the Hunter sigh sadly and with a faint wistfulness she left the insects to their work, headed towards the green door at the end of the path. A well placed super missile; the door quietly slid open. The force of the impact dislodged a few alien critters from the ceiling and they quickly scurried for cover. The Hunter allowed herself a smile, watching them dive for safety underneath the vines. She had recognized them. An alien crab with knobbly eyes, a spiked geemer with its multiple little legs, and a few of the curious trilobites she had seen feasting on the corpses of long dead GF soldiers further up, when she had vanquished the beast known as Kraid.

She turned to the new room she had exposed herself to. The heat was rising. Beyond the door the plantlife had ceased, for it could not exist in that heat. The soil was red and crumbling and what plantlife did survive was twisted and brown. The door swished closed behind her as she stepped in.

The Hunter was dead certain it no longer smelled like flowers here, and with a heavy heart started her downward progression, getting ever closer to Norfair and ever closer to the creature that had killed her family. She hated this place, no matter how natural it was.

For she knew it smelled of nothing but sulphur and death. And those smells reminded her solely of revenge.


	3. Such Patient Sorrow

_Sorrow. So much sorrow. And yet it was natural. Just as Maridia was full of water so was it full of sadness, a deep aching melancholy that was at the same time both heartbreaking and beautiful. Oneshot._

Water.

So much water.

It was almost sad, in some strange way the Hunter couldn’t quite comprehend. This was a natural phenomena: an underground ocean created over tens of millions of years by the steadily pouring acid rain that refused to let up. Nature had created it, and nature had populated it. Then why would something so natural seem so unbearably sad? Why was it that every time the Hunter came down here, immersed herself in the underwater tranquility of Maridia, that she was gripped with such agonizing sorrow and loneliness…?

A skeletal fish swam languidly by, its drooping fins stirring up the sediment that had collected after aeons on the cave floor. Even the fauna here looked sad. The fish’s mouth was half open and gaping and its down turned eyes, glowing a faint yellow, made it look like it was about to start crying.

Maybe that’s where the ocean came from, she mused with a smirk. Maybe the fish had cried it here.

She stopped to watch the fish swim by, resting her hand on a rocky wall. It was covered in a thin layer of slimy sea moss coloured a deep green. It blended well into the dismal blue rock, almost looking like a natural colouring, a splash of mineral deposit, instead of a live plant. With a faint sigh the Hunter looked past the fish. The gloom up ahead was pitch black and she could just make out the glowing yellow of eyes. She turned and looked back. Same story. Up. Impenetrable blackness. And down, over the edge of the precipice. A deep abyss of swirling cold and loneliness.

The Hunter felt a dull ache at the center of her being and with a heavy heart turned away from the fish. It disappeared into the gloom with nary a sound. That’s why Maridia was so sad, she realised. It was stuck here in its own little prison, with nothing but the cold rock and the deafening silence to keep it company. In fact, all of Zebes radiated sorrow. It was just more profound down here, without the constant clatter of Space Pirate feet to shatter the sadness. It was a dull loneliness that the Hunter felt in her heart, that she could relate to. After the Chozo had left, Zebes had been sad. And it had never recovered.

Suddenly much more depressed than she was before she had arrived here, the Hunter scanned the cavern. A door a few meters to the right. Standard energy door: blue. Made to keep the local fauna out and the illegal experiments in. Absently she angled towards it. A burst of bubbles issued from her respirator, but in the gloomy silence, she heard nothing.

She had a job to do. A species to eradicate. A parasitic life-form to retrieve.

But there was so much water.

And it was just as sad as she was.


	4. Such Dark Silence

_Cold. Space is always cold. Unimaginable in its intensity and beyond human comprehension. So when the ship crashed on Zebes so long ago, it brought a little bit of the cold with it. And its been home to the dark horror of space ever since..._

Nothingness. 

Cold. Black. Absolute. 

Stretching to infinity back and as insufferably lonely as the ocean floor, a whispered thread of sorrow before slipping silently through the cracks. Everything was dead. Dead walls, dead floor, dead machinery. Littering the derelict vessel like steel and glass plants, thick pipes worming into the mechanical ground, looking for their electric fuel. But, nothing. Ever since the last organic creature had died countless aeons ago, the lifeforce had gone with it, leaving the ship as cold as the space through whence it came and its hull as battered and ancient as the deadly debris it had travelled through. 

The Hunter was silent, not even the faintest of sighs escaped her pursed lips. She never did like it here. For even though the gloomy underwater ocean of Maridia was sad, the wrecked ship was sadder, and where the roaring voice of Norfair screamed in rage, the wrecked ship was infinitely angrier. The only place surpassing it in terms of emotion was Brinstar, but only because it held the last remnants of what made the once grand ship remarkable: life. And it was envious. Envious of Zebes and all the life it held, mocking it. Laughing at its all encompassing steel walls and the trapped spirits writhing, always begging for escape, only for their calls to fall on deaf ears, for no one in all the vastness of the universe cared. 

The distinct sound of shattering glass, ringing through the dead air on diseased currents. Nerves pumping the Hunter jumped to action, her cannon raised and charging. But the ship was quiet, once again dead. Just as quickly as the sudden noise tore through the silence then did the silence swallow her once again, laying ethereal hands over her amour and holding her close, as though afraid she would leave. 

Which was, of course, exactly what she planned on doing. 

Anxious fear flooded her mind, a sickly sheen of sweat tainted yellow by the light breaking out on her forehead. A sudden shadow off to her right, a spot of darkness darker than its surrounding shadow and a quick flit of unnatural movement. Contrary to what her scans had told her, of the inhospitable nature of this wrecked vessel, there was life even here. And knowing how the universe functioned there was no doubt that it was malevolent. But the darkness and gloom showed her nothing, and a thin shiver going up her spine she activated her thermal visor. 

The wrecked ship was lit up in saturated blues and greens, the colours of cold and murk saved for places of death and decay. Nothing stood out of the ordinary, no flashes of organic heat or unnatural cold. The ship was as dead as the moment she set foot inside its scarred hull and finally, with the faintest of sighs, the Hunter berated herself. Fear was not allowed here. Fear only made the demons and monsters hiding in the shadows worse. 

Fear would not rule her. 

And oh, what was this? A tiny blip, a soundless blink in the corner of her HUD. Something, deep deep down in the bowels of the wrecked ship. Something alive and evil and ancient. Jaw set, but still afraid, the Hunter changed her course. She had a sinking sensation she’d never feel the safety of reassurance here. The place was simply too old and dead and the haunting echoes of entities long gone always made her cringe. 

But she had a mission to fulfill, and pushing her very human fear away set towards the blip on her radar. 

Maybe it held answers, maybe not. 

But it would be more informative than the darkness, that much was certain. Give her more answers than the bitter gloom that tried to grab at her every moment she walked here, every second she brought her armoured feet down on aeons old mould and spores. 

And even though she ignored it, she was still afraid. 

For the darkness continued to close in, so cold and dead...


	5. Such Bitter Hatred

_Anger. Seething bitter rage, slowly building up in the underground caverns of volcanic Norfair, waiting for a chance to explode and devour all. For even though Zebes radiated desolate desperation, its molten heart spoke of nothing but hatred._

Anger. 

A steady beat of rising anger. 

It was almost as though the primal beat of Zebes’ molten heart had fractured, had split, and was slowly but surely making its way up. Devouring all within its path and leaving nothing but fiery caves and volcanic vents; sulphur laden air and a wavering miasma of pure hatred. 

Norfair was angry. 

And the Hunter did not blame it. She had often wondered if a planet could have emotion. If a compacted ball of rock and mineral floating in its predetermined course around a central star in the dark reaches of space could develop a sort of sentience of its own. Norfair had never been this active, she knew. Not until the Chozo had left. Not until the Pirates had come. Not until the once peaceful twisting maze of alien architecture had been twisted into a technological hotbed of experimentation and abuse. Just as Maridia encompassed Zebes’ sadness and Brinstar its abundance of life, still scrabbling for purchase; just as Crateria showcased its desolation and the Wrecked Ship resonated nothing but cold fear; Norfair had taken the anger. 

A torrent of roaring flame and screaming gas erupted from the ground in front of her, and in a purely instinctive gesture the Hunter threw up her cannon for protection, shielding her face. It was a redundant move to pull. Her suit protected her from the flame and the heat, kept her safe. Just as Old Bird wanted. Feeling slightly embarrassed at her foolishness she smiled faintly, still alert in the subterranean hell. Sometimes, when she was alone, she liked to think of the suit as her old chozo friend, wrapping his feathered arms around her and keeping her from harm. Only instead of soft feathers tickling her face she was encompassed in cold steel and intricate systems, a barrage of warnings and meters and timers whispering into her ears in the place of the old guttural voice of a bird. 

Absently the Hunter trailed her eyes over to the map displayed in the corner of her HUD, getting her mind back to the present. An orange door this time, one activated by the explosion of a power bomb. The pirates must have something big hiding down here, and she already knew what it was. 

The very embodiment of Norfair’s anger, a demon borne on deceptively scrawny wings who spoke in tongues of flame with eyes of burning hatred. Only it wasn’t Zebes’ anger that it embodied, it was hers. And she would slay that dragon the moment she set eyes upon him. The Hunter knew he was down here. She had seen the decorative--No, the resplendent decorations that alien monstrosity had put up. Despite a ferocious visage Ridley was highly intelligent, and he simply couldn’t say no to his face carved in stone. 

The Hunter’s mouth had pulled into a cold sneer without her realizing it. 

_Ridley._

She would kill him. And she would enjoy it. She would pull his tongue out and crack his mouth open and shove her cannon so far down his throat that when she pulled the trigger all he would be able to do is blink once, and she would smile. And he would die. And Zebes could finally rest. 

She sighed, trekking deeper into the planet. Zebes would never rest. Not until the cancerous tumour of Zebesian engineering was removed completely. Not until Mother Brain herself was uprooted and overthrown and smashed into a million pieces and the Space Pirates destroyed, finally and utterly. Only then would the planet heave a sigh and once again sleep, and her with it. 

In the meantime, though, it would rage. And oh would it rage. With a heart as volatile as Norfair, there was nothing else it could do. 

And, boiling lava slowly making way for the acid that comprised the lowest of the low, temperatures still skyrocketing, the Hunter travelled ever lower. Old Bird held her close, his steel wings comforting her rage. She understood why Norfair was so bitter. It was the same bitter hatred clouding her thoughts. And now, when she was so close, she embraced it. 

The acid boiled hotter. 

The rocks glowed brighter. 

And the hunter travelled lower.


	6. Such Indifferent Corruption

_Death. Seeping upwards like a slow spreading cancer. Infecting every aspect of Zebes with fingers of icy malevolence. And Tourian; the thriving tumour at its poor diseased heart..._

Lifeless, decayed. 

Unnatural. 

Jutting spires of stained and corroded steel rising from the floor of constantly bubbling acid, towering above the Hunter like slowly dying sentinels. Always watching. Always mourning. And always dying. 

In a state of constant dilapidation. If not for the regular repairs from the Space Pirates their impenetrable fortress of steel and stone would have collapsed long ago. And heaven knew Zebes was trying so very hard to make such a thing happen. It was always pushing, always pressing in with rocky hands and a guttural voice, desperate to rid itself of the unnatural Pirate cancer slowly killing it from the inside out. But in the end it was nothing more than a planet, a natural force. And it could do nothing against technology, no matter how hard it tried. 

But the Hunter was so close, so near the revenge she had made her life’s duty to dole out. The leader, the overlord, the _brain_. It was so frustratingly near. Buried so far down in this technological hell, underneath the pipes and steel and acid. With nothing but the constant gurgling belch of the place to keep it company. 

Deftly the Hunter leapt over a yawning chasm of acid and shot out the far door, grimacing from behind the safety of her green tinted visor. Was that the acid giving out that constant noise, like a starving creature? Or the Mother Brain itself? If the Hunter were to remove her helmet, for nary but a second, and breathe in the toxic fumes before she died, would she smell the metallic stench of corruption and decay? Would it assail her senses like an invading parasite and strike her where she stood? 

_Skreee!_

Now that was something she hadn’t expected. Something she hadn’t seen in far too long. Ducking quickly she brought up her cannon and aimed, firing once. The resulting shot of icy energy froze the attacking creature on the spot, leaving it to watch her with faintly pulsing nuclei. A Metroid. The Pirates had been busy, she thought sullenly, walking up to inspect the insidious creature. It trembled slightly, desperate to break out of its icy prison. And with a heavy heart, the Hunter activated her missiles, shattering the frozen Metroid into a myriad glimmering shards, each of them reflecting a warped version of her helmeted face. 

Quickly she looked away, unable to see herself reflected in such a twisted manor. For but the briefest of seconds she doubted herself. Was this really the right thing to do? To set out on this holy crusade against an entire species for the faults of a select few? But a quick glance at the corrupted steel foundations around her confirmed it. Zebes was not just a planet, it was an entity all its own. Its emotions manifested in its environments. Anger, Norfair; sorrow, Maridia; loneliness, Crateria; life, Brinstar; resentment, the Wrecked Ship. And this place? Tourian? It represented nothing. It had no soul, it had no life. It sucked the planet’s energy dry and grew on a warped mixture of pain and power. 

The Pirates had to die. Their operation had to die. 

_Mother! Don’t leave me!_ A woosh of unholy fire, her parents incinerating before her eyes, her long forgotten home of K2-L set into a raging blaze of flame. 

Ridley was already dead. Mother Brain was next. And then the Space Pirates themselves. 

Hot tears stinging her eyes she continued onwards, the security cams watching her every move. They knew she was coming. They were getting ready. The Hunter clad in orange had come back for redemption, reborn out of the fires of her destroyed colony as a being of pure hate and vengeance, as something the Pirates themselves had unwittingly created in their lust for power. 

She was so very, very close. 

Only a few more levels to go. 

And finally long sought after revenge would be hers.


	7. And in the End

The Hunter gasped in shock as her foe reared up from the ground on a grossly distorted body of steel and flesh, grinning that skinless crocodile grin, her face a grotesque mockery of a human skull. 

“Mother,” she whispered, at the same time reverent and abhorrent. Reverent for her age old foe had decided this time to put up a fight; abhorrent for all the crimes Mother Brain had committed against the universe. Muscles working of their own accord, the Hunter raised her cannon and sighted down the barrel, centering on Mother Brain’s single bloodshot eye. She breathed in deeply, never before feeling so calm. 

“Time to die…” 

The next five seconds happened in slow motion. Her finger closed on the internal trigger of her cannon at the same time as the Mother’s single bloated eye began absorbing energy from the air behind it, that fake smile for a moment closing. A single drop of corrosive drool fell in a sticky glob from its face before both of them let loose their attacks. But where the Hunter’s charged blast fell harmlessly on reinforced steel hide the Mother’s was successful, and never before had Samus felt herself in so much pain. 

She screamed, her muscles spasming and locking up. Her Chozonian power suit was useless. It had all been in vain. She had come all this way, only to die at the reptilian feet of her alien killer. Pained the hunter fell to her knees, gasping for the breath that playfully evaded her. The beam of pure energy ceased as the Mother Brain started charging for another. It began to laugh, and the Hunter closed her eyes. 

She was defeated. 

But then… A familiar screech. Jerkily she looked up, and what she saw astounded her. A Metroid of immense size, gripping tightly her foe’s misshapen head and draining it slowly but surely of its life force. And, a moment later, it detatched, floating sedately overhead. The Hunter screwed her eyes shut, for certain that she was next and laughing morbidly about how she was not killed by the Mother Brain, but by a single Metroid. Mother Brain stood still against the far wall, nothing more than a dead statue. 

Then, warm glow. Her pain fading into golden light, her hazy mind clearing. Her body rejuvenating. But how…? 

She opened her eyes to something out of a dream. A surreal scene she couldn’t quite understand. Tenderly, almost afraid, she reached out a shaking hand to the gently pulsing walls of green that surrounded her. And when she touched it, she felt nothing but pure warmth. Warmth suffused on that same golden light she could not see but felt deep down in her core. With a battered and bruised face, she smiled. 

“Hatchling…” 

The Metroid larva, hulking huge from its many meals, rumbled in purred response and continued to feed her every last bit of its stolen energy. And at that point something shattered the bond between them, something huge and angry that attacked with concentrated beams of energy. 

The hatchling shook, using its own body as a shield even when the Hunter had been fully rejuvenated. She watched in horror as its once healthy green faded by slow degrees into a dark, dirty yellow. With a final skree the creature lifted up off of her, as though challenging the Mother Brain, and it was at that instant that the insidious Pirate creature fired. 

The Hunter and the hatchling screamed as one and for a moment it seemed as though everything Samus had ever held dear had been violently stolen from her, leaving a gaping hole in her hardened heart. But just as quickly it as filled by something else, something stronger. Something given to her by the only friend she had ever known in its last moments of consciousness. 

With renewed vigour she raised her cannon and fired once, her golden suit sparking in defiance. The beam that issued from her cannon flashed a million different colours, and when it hit the Mother Brain the creature felt pain for the first time. And it screamed accordingly. With clenched teeth the Hunter continued her ruthless assault, remembering with vivid clarity the deaths of friends and family, all the way from K2-L up until now. Every agonized scream from that loathsome creature did nothing but invigorate the Hunter even more, and it was in short time that the Mother Brain’s manufactured body was reduced to nothing more than charred stump. Her head fell loudly to the ground, and a moment later evaporated into a pile of sick coloured dust. 

The Hunter was victorious. 

The cold industrial lighting faded to harsh red and the planet began to shake. The Hunter’s stomach fell. A harsh compurized voice started up over the speaker system. 

_Self destruct sequence initiated. Planet destruction in T minus 5 minutes._

She started to run. She ran as fast as she could and then some, her Hyper Beam cutting bloody swathes through the Zebesian Pirates that tried desperately to capture her. They were not going to die unless they took her with them. But the Hunter would not go down so easily and continued to run and jump, advancing ever upwards. Even as the acid began to bubble up from beneath the floor and the machinery around her exploded. Even as Zebes itself began to scream in its harsh primal voice and chunks of stone began to fall. 

Even amid all that, the Hunter still ran. She only stopped once to free some old friends: the Dachora and the Etecoons. Sentient beings she could not simply leave to such a grisly fate. She ran and she ran until she exited the quaking caves to her ship, still waiting resolutely where she had landed so many days ago. And in one fluid movement she jumped, her arc taking her directly into her ship. Slowly it powered on, and just as slowly it began to rise. Up, up it rose through roiling clouds, and Samus could not help but look down as she went. And what she saw made her heart cry. 

Crateria was cracking, its already scarred face snapping and tearing and breaking. 

Norfair was beginning to push through, splattering the landscape with glowing reds and yellows. 

Brinstar was burning up from the sudden influx of magma, resulting in sporadic bursts of screaming flame. 

Maridia was boiling and dying, issuing forth from Crateria’s cracked face impressive bursts of white steam. 

The Wrecked ship shuddered and sank into a pool of bright acid, melting almost immediately. 

And Tourian was crushed by slabs of stone and flooded with acid, killing everything within. 

And with one last scream, the combined voice of each of its disparate facets, Zebes itself met its grisly end, exploding in a brilliant flash of white. When the intense glow faded the Hunter slowed her ship to a stop and turned to watch. Even in death, the planet was beautiful, its body reduced to a smear of celestial gas backlight by a bright blue star. A tiny streak of bright purple cut through the scene before entering hyper drive and quickly disappearing. 

Samus Aran removed her helmet and put her face in her hands, suddenly very tired. Quickly she jerked away and brought a hand to her face, frightened. When she pulled it away she expected to see a hand covered in red blood. But instead, she found herself looking at wet fingers. Confused, she brought a finger to her mouth and tasted warm salt. She was crying. 

Zebes was destroyed. The hatchling was dead. The Space Pirates and their Mother Brain had been eradicated. And she was crying. The Hunter never cried. But Samus Aran did. And this time, instead of pushing away the emotion, she embraced it and let the tears come. Let them wash away all her hate and fear and loathing and sadness as surely as time would continue to tick every onwards. 

And she silently set new coordinates, back to Federation HQ, light years away on Earth. Tired, she slumped into her command chair and let the gunship pilot itself. For the time being, she would sleep. 

Mission Completed.


End file.
